A slice of life

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"Look at the soil," says Rob Maunder, reaching into the
post-harvest wheat stubble and grabbing a handful of rich, dark
dirt. "Look how good that is."

Most of us don't think of soil when we pop a slice of bread in
the toaster in the morning. But the earth is where our daily bread
gets its start. Every loaf begins in a sundrenched, rainswept,
ever-changing paddock.

Rob and Mez Maunder are two of almost 40,000 farmers across
Australia who grow wheat for our bread, noodles, cakes, pasta and
biscuits.

"You feel as though you are doing something worthwhile," says
Mez. "You are growing something for people to eat."

Eighteen years ago, the Maunders decided to adopt organic
farming practices. After three years in conversion, their farm, The
Wilgas, near Moree, was certified organic. That means, among other
things, no chemicals.

They control weeds and build up the soils using the old ways -
crop rotation, with some paddocks allowed to lie fallow;
cultivation; and the contributions of sheep that eat weeds and then
manure the soil. The Maunders also sell organic lambs to butchers
in Sydney.

They grow other crops, too - lucerne to feed the sheep, soy
beans to sell and, in some years, rye and buckwheat. But wheat is
their big crop.

It's easy to tell when the annual harvest is under way. An army
of contract workers makes its way south, starting in Queensland in
the spring and finishing in the southern states sometimes as late
as January.

The harvesting machinery is constantly encountered on the road,
moving from paddock to paddock, farm to farm, stripping the heads
of wheat and delivering it to waiting trucks.

There are three broad categories of wheat grown in Australia.
Hard wheats - more common in northern growing areas - have a higher
protein content and are used for breads and specialty noodles. Soft
wheats make their way into cakes, confectionery, biscuits and
pastries. Durum wheat is used for pasta, semolina and couscous.

Some of the Maunders' soft wheat (they grow a variety with the
resonantly Australian name of rosella) eventually is made into
noodles for the Japanese market. Their hard wheat will end up at
some of Australia's best bakeries, but it has a long journey ahead
of it first.

The mill

Somehow, you expect a flour mill to be big and noisy. The
milling room at the Wholegrain Milling Company is neither. The room
is only seven metres by six metres, the noise level loud but far
from deafening, even with a line of five stone mills spinning away.
There's a small drift of flour near the packing machine, but
otherwise it's cleaner and less dusty than you might expect.

The domestic milling industry grinds through about 2 million
tonnes of wheat flour a year. Much of that is processed by giants
such as Manildra and Weston Milling, but there are small,
specialist mills at work too. Wholegrain Milling, in Gunnedah, is
one of them.

This is a family company, started in 1984 by Wendy and Harry
Neale. As an organic operator, it was dangerously ahead of its
time. "There was only a tiny market," explains son Craig, who
rejoined the family business three years ago.

"I really thought we were flogging a dead horse. We were just
too early."

"Organic awareness has really grown in the last three years. I
came back partly because I could see things were going to
change."

Now, the Neales supply organic bakers, biscuit and pie makers
and other buyers - even a wheatgrass juice maker - along the east
coast and overseas. Bakery customers include Infinity, La Tartine
and St Honore in Sydney.

Grain suppliers are similarly spread out. The mill isn't just
looking for organic grain, it's looking for good grain, grain that
meets its protein requirements. The Maunders are regular suppliers.
Other wheat comes from Central Queensland, from the Mallee and
South Australia, even from Western Australian in some years. "If it
makes the grade, we take it," says Neale.

After foreign material such as soil or other seeds or grains is
removed, the wheat goes into the mills. Imported European
millstones are used for grinding wheat into flour.

Two stones, each about a metre in diameter, are positioned with
their specially cut and shaped grinding surfaces facing each other.
Grain, fed in through a hopper above, is broken and ground as it is
carried out from the centre along grooves in the stones, emerging
from the sides as flour. It takes only seconds.

Wheat is a kind of grass; wheat grains are seeds. Each grain has
three main parts: the starch- and protein-filled central endosperm;
the germ, a smaller, oily area at one end that germinates to
produce a new wheat seedling; and the fibrous outer layer, the
bran.

Some milling processes separate the endosperm from the bran and
germ, to yield white flours with longer keeping qualities. In stone
milling, wheat retains all its components - the germ is distributed
through the flour, endowing the flour with a nuttiness that shows
up in the bread made with it.

On average, Wholegrain processes five tonnes of various grains a
day. Some is sold as wholewheat bread flour - milled flour with
nothing removed. Lighter wholemeal flours and white bread and cake
flours are made by sifting wholemeal flour to remove increasing
amounts of bran. The mill often runs up to 10 hours a day, five to
seven days a week, to keep up with demand, also processing rye,
rice, oats and spelt, using separate systems for gluten-free
grains.

And milling's not the only business in the building - a sign
declares this is the home, too, of the Gunnedah Massage Therapy
Clinic. "Dad does that," says Craig Neale.

The baker

"One of the great culinary miracles of the world is that if you
look at a basic loaf of bread, you know that the only things in it
are water and bread. And perhaps salt," says Philip Searle.

Searle, the owner of Darlinghurst's Infinity bakery, has long
been fascinated by bread, particularly sourdough. "It's the true
form of bread," he says.

"But one of the great misconceptions about it - and it was a
misconception of mine - is that sourdough describes a taste. People
come in and ask 'what's a sourdough?' and I explain it's a method
of making bread, rather than a taste. Some of it is sour, but some
of it is actually sweet.

"Sourdough is sort of a misnomer. We call it sourdough, the
Americans call it sourdough, but the French call it a levain
[which] means the starter, or the mother."

Sourdough breads are made using the natural yeasts that live in
the air. There are other little beasties called lactobacilli -
lactic-acid producing bacteria - floating around and contributing
to the complex flavour of sourdoughs. The various wild yeasts and
lactobacilli are usually captured from the air and held in the
starter culture, the flour and water. The levain method has been
used for thousands of years, in many parts of the world.

"Until the mid-19th century, all the bread coming out of ovens
anywhere in the world would have been similar to the organic
sourdoughs at Infinity," says Searle.

"Then, with the development of commercial yeast, bakers realised
it would lighten the bread and they could find a different
market.

"But," he laments, "then it went completely downhill and they
forgot about sourdough and just used commercial yeasts."

Searle believes there's a role for both. Infinity's two ranges
of bread, organic sourdough and white, use two cultures: an
original sourdough started by Searle's former partner at Infinity,
Brent Hersee, some 16 years ago, and a "child of the original"
that's fed with a white flour. Breads in the white range are made
with a more refined, non-organic flour, and also get a tiny
percentage of commercial baker's yeast in the mix. The taste, says
Searle, is similar, but the baker's yeast lightens the texture.

"You are using such a predominant amount of the sourdough
mother. That flavour will dominate. The only reason to use the
commercial yeast is to lighten the texture."

Infinity has used Wholegrain Milling flour for its organic
breads since the bakery opened seven years ago. "It's exceptional
flour and they do their job with unbelieveable integrity," says
Searle.

"When we opened, I had this romantic idea we would survive
selling organic sourdough. I completely misjudged it and that's why
we introduced the white range. You have to take note of what
customers want.

"I was anticipating an organic explosion about 2000 and I was
wrong - but I think it's about to happen now. The market for
organic bread keeps going up and up."

There's certainly a constant flow through the doors of Infinity.
The shop is open 364 days a year, often up to 20 hours a day. Long
after the shop staff leave, passersby pop in and wait for a break
in production so one of the busy bakers can sell them a cake to
take to a late supper, a muffin for a snack or a loaf for
tomorrow's toast.

By 8pm, the first breads are coming out of the oven. The smells
wafting out the door draw in more customers to buy a fresh high-top
brioche or a fruit bread. Later, a volunteer from a nearby charity
arrives to collect some of the day's unsold bread. Through it all,
under the quiet, watchful eye of head baker Mounir Ayad, production
goes on - a soothingly repetitive cycle of mixing, fermenting,
cutting and weighing, shaping, proving and baking that continues
almost until dawn.

The customer

Camilla Nelson has been a regular at Infinity since she moved to
Darlinghurst several years ago. Now her four-month-old son, Oliver,
joins her.

"Everyone who works in the shop thinks I'm here all the time,"
says Nelson. "I would buy a couple of loaves a week - and then on
Saturday my partner and I have a big Saturday morning ritual:
breakfast with the newspapers and croissants and coffee and the
lot, so we go and buy lots of things. [Infinity bakes] really good
bread ... once you've had real coffee you can't go back, and it's
the same with bread."

Nelson's favourite loaf is the plain sourdough, a caramel-brown
loaf with a moist, creamy-coloured interior and chewy crust. "It
goes with everything. When you have it the same day, it's
wonderful, but you can eat the same loaf all week and it still
tastes good. Supermarket bread is like air and sugar. This tastes
like you're actually eating something. It has a weight to it."